I usually don’t blog about updates on the Boost.Http project because I want as much info as possible in code and documentation (or even git history), not here. However, I got a stimulus to change this habit. A new parser I’ve been writing replaced the NodeJS parser in Boost.Http and here is the most appropriate place to inform about the change. This will be useful info also if you’re interested in using NodeJS parser, any HTTP parser or even designing a parser with a stable API unrelated to HTTP.

EDIT (2016/08/07): I tried to clarify the text. Now I try to make it clear whether I’m refering to the new parser (the new parser I wrote) or the old parser (NodeJS parser) everywhere in the text. I’ll also refer to Boost.Http with new parser as new Boost.Http and Boost.Http with old parser as old Boost.Http.

What’s wrong with NodeJS parser?

I started developing a new parser because several users wanted a header-only library and the parser was the main barrier for that in my library. I took the opportunity to also provide a better interface which isn’t limited to C language (inconvenient and lots of unsafe type casts) and uses a style that doesn’t own the control flow (easier to deal with HTTP upgrade and doesn’t require lots of jump’n’back among callbacks).

The old parser is so hard to use that I wouldn’t dare to use the same tricks I’ve used in the new Boost.Http to avoid allocations on the old Boost.Http. So the NodeJS parser doesn’t allocate, but dealing with it (old Boost.Http) is so hard that you don’t want to reuse the buffer to keep incomplete tokens at all (forcing allocation or a big-enough secondary buffer to hold them in old Boost.Http).

HTTP upgrade is also very tricky and the lack of documentation for the NodeJS parser is depressing. So I only trust my own code as an usage reference for NodeJS parser.

However, I’ve hid all this complexity from my users. My users wanted a different parser because they wanted a header-only library. I personally only wanted to change the parser because the NodeJS parser only accepts a limited set of HTTP methods and it was tricky to properly not perform any allocation. The new parser even makes it easier to reject an HTTP element before decoding it (e.g. a URL too long will exhaust the buffer and then the new Boost.Http can just check the `expected_token` function to know it should reply with 414 status code instead concatenating a lot of URL pieces until it detect the limit was reached).

If you aren’t familiar enough with HTTP details, you cannot assume the NodeJS parser will abstract HTTP framing. Your code will get the wrong result and it’ll go silent for a long time before you know it.

The new parser

EDIT(2016/08/09): The new parser is almost ready. It can be used to parse request messages (it’ll be able to parse response messages soon). It’s written in C++03. It’s header-only. It only depends on boost::string_ref, boost::asio::const_buffer and a few others that I may be missing from memory right now. The new parser doesn’t allocate data and returns control to the user as soon as one token is ready or an error is reached. You can mutate the buffer while the parser maintains a reference to it. And the parser will decode the tokens, so you do not need ugly hacks as NodeJS parser requires (removing OWS from the end of header field values).

I want to tell you that the new parser was NOT designed to Boost.Http needs. I wanted to make a general parser and the design started. Then I wanted to replace NodeJS parser within Boost.Http and parts have fit nicely. The only part that didn’t fit perfectly at the time to integrate pieces was a missing end_of_body token that was easy to add in the new parser code. This was the only time that I, as the author of Boost.Http and as a user of the new parser, used my power, as the author of the parser itself, to push my needs on everybody else. And this token was a nice addition anyway (using NodeJS API you’d use http_body_is_final).

There is also the “parser combinators” part of this project (still not ready) that I’ve only understood once I’ve watched a talk from Scott Wlaschin. Initially I was having a lot of trouble because I wanted stateful miniparsers to avoid “reparsing” certain parts, but you rarely read 1-sized chunks and I was only complicating things. The combinators part is tricky to deliver, because the next expected token will depend on the value (semantic, not syntax) of current token and this is hard to represent using expressions like Boost.Spirit abstractions. Therefore, I’m only going to deliver the mini-parsers, not the combinators. Feel free to give me feedback/ideas if you want to.

Needless to say the new parser should have the same great features from NodeJS parser like no allocations or syscals behind the scenes. But it was actually easier to avoid and decrease allocations on Boost.Http thanks to the parser’s design of not forcing the user to accumulate values on separate buffers and making offsets easy to obtain.

I probably could achieve the same effect of decreased buffers in Boost.Http with NodeJS parser, but it was quite hard to work with NodeJS parser (read section above). And you should know that the old Boost.Http related to the parser was almost 3 times bigger (it’d be almost 4 times bigger, but I had to add code to detect keep alive property because the new parser only care about message framing) than the new Boost.Http code related to the parser.

On the topic of performance, the new Boost.Http tests consume 7% more time to finish (using a CMake Release build with GCC under my machine). I haven’t spent time trying to improve performance and I think I’ll only try to improve memory usage anyway (the size of the parser structure).

A drawback (is it?) is that the new parser only cares about structuring the HTTP stream. It doesn’t care about connection state (exception: receiving http 1.0 response body/connection close event). Therefore, you need to implement the keep-alive yourself (which the Boost.Http higher-level layers do).

I want to emphasize that the authors of the NodeJS parser have done a wonderful job with what they had in hands: C!

Migrating code to use the new parser

First, I haven’t added the code to parse the status line yet, so the parser is limited to HTTP requests. It shouldn’t take long (a few weeks until I finish this and several other tasks).

Tufão project has been using NodeJS parser improperly for ages and it’d be hard to fix that. Therefore, I’ll replace “Tufão’s parser” with this new shiny one in the next Tufão releaseTufão 1.4.0 has been refactored to use this new parser. It’ll finally gain It finally received support for HTTP pipelining and plenty of bugfixes that nobody noticed will land landed. Unfortunately I got the semantics for HTTP upgrade within Tufão wrong and it kind of has “forced HTTP upgrade” (this is something I got right in Boost.Http thanks to RFC7230 clarification).

Next steps

I may have convinced you to prefer Boost.Http parser over NodeJS parser when it comes to C++ projects. However, I hope to land a few improvements before calling it ready.

Test wise I can already tell you more than 80% of all the code written for this parser are tests (like 4 lines of test for each 1 line of implementation). However I haven’t run the tests in combination with sanitizers (yet!) and there a few more areas where tests can be improved (include coverage, allocate buffer chunks separately so sanitizers can detect invalid access attempts, fuzzers…) and I’ll work on them as well.

I can add some code to deduce the optimum size for indexes and return a parser with a little less overhead memory-wise.

I’d rather work on the request router, but I don’t have a strong design for a request router right now because I’m still experimenting. A weak design would translate on a weak proposal and I decided to propose a HTTP parser.

Misc

An interesting HTTP library that carries some similarities with Boost.Http was announced on the Boost mailing list: Beast.

There was valuable feedback that I gained through the review process. Feedback that I can use to improve the library. And improvements to the library shouldn’t stop once the library is accepted into Boost, so I was expecting to spend more time in the library even after the review, as suggested by the presence of a roadmap chapter on the library documentation.

The biggest complaint about the library now was completeness. The library “hasn’t proven” that the API is right. The lack of higher-level building blocks was important to contribute to the lack of trust in current API. Also, if such library was to enter in Boost, it should be complete, so new users would have a satisfying first impression and continue to use the library after the initial contact. I was worried about delivering a megazord library to be reviewed in just one review, but that’s what will happen next time I submit the library to review. At least I introduced several concepts to the readers already.

Things that I planned were forgotten when I created the documentation and I’ll have to improve documentation once again to ensure guarantees that I had planned already. Also, some neat ideas were given to improve library design and further documentation updates will be required. Documentation was also lacking in the area of tutorial. Truth be told, I’m not very skilled in writing tutorials. Hopefully, the higher-level API will help me to introduce the library to newbies. Also, I can include several tutorials in the library to improve its status.

There was an idea about parser/generator (like 3-level instead 2-level indirection) idea that will require me to think even more about the design. Even now, I haven’t thought enough about this design yet. One thing for sure is that I’ll have to expose an HTTP parser because that’s the only thing that matters for some users.

A few other minor complaints were raised that can be addressed easily.

And for now, I need to re-read all messages given for the review and register associated issues in the project’s issue tracker. I’d like to have something ready by January, but it’ll probably take 6 months to 1 year before I submit the library again. Also, the HTTP client library is something that will possibly delay the library a lot, as I’ll research power users like Firefox and Chromium to make sure that the library is feature-ready for everybody.

So much work that maybe I’ll submit the library as a project on GSoC again next year to gather some more funding.

Also, I’d like to use this space to spread two efforts that I intend to make once the library is accepted into Boost:

A Rust “port” of the library. Actually, it won’t be an 1:1 port, as I intend to use Rust’s unique expressiveness to develop a library that feels like a library that was born with Rust in mind.

An enhanced, non-slow and not resource-hungry implementation (maybe Rust, maybe C++) of the trsst project.

EDIT (2016/03/20):

And for now, I need to re-read all messages given for the review and register associated issues in the project’s issue tracker.

I’d like to have something ready by January, but it’ll probably take 6 months to 1 year before I submit the library again.

I think I was being too optimistic when I commented “6 months”. It’d only be possible to complete it within 6 months if Boost.Http was the only project I was developing. Of course I have a job and university and the splitted focus wouldn’t allow me to finish the library in just this small amount of time.

After working on this project for more than a year, I’m pretty glad it finally reached this milestone. And I’m very confident about the review.

I had written about this project so much here and there that when the time to write about it in my own blog comes, I don’t have many words left. It’s a good thing to leave as much info on the documentation itself and don’t spread info everywhere or try to lure users into my blog by providing little information on the documentation.

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Introduction

Every now and then I have contact with a few programming languages and this is the subset that I believe it would give me a very close insight to the sum of the all languages that I’ve had contact with. Also, this subset is not only based on the choice of ideas that each language aggregate, but also on their usefulness and importance for the general programmer’s toolbox.

Regex

Just about the most awesome way to describe and manipulate words from regular languages. No matter if it’s used as communication purposes within some specification or if it’s used to crawl certain patterns within a large collection of texts. It’s useful even within the programming environment itself. And to contribute to its awesomeness, it’s one of the easiest and fastest things to learn. It’s useful even for non-programmers (think about that time when you want to rename all files from a folder to have better consistency).

MarkDown/CommonMark

Started as a simple tool to pretify common syntax used in text-based email. But now just about almost every major site visited by programmers (e.g. StackOverflow, Reddit, GitHub, Doxygen-generated ones) has some support for MarkDown. Or its recent attempt for a smart standardization to spread good common practices and inspire better interoperability among supporting tools.

You can think of MarkDown as a simple way to describe which parts of the text will be bold or will be the tittle for a subsection and so on. MarkDown is simple! MarkDown is simple enough to be accepted in non-programmer targeted products like blogging platforms (even WordPress) or discussion platforms.

C

A language that appeared in 1972 that is still interesting and it’s still important. Being the “portable Assembly”, operating system’s kernels are still written in C. Pieces of software dealing with low-level are still written in C. Embedded projects are still written in C.

C is not a popular language out of merits. C is just the right abstraction to forget about Assembly, but still have no overhead between your software and the machine. Compilers will do a fantastic job in no time for you.

C is an easy language to learn, adding just a few handful abstractions like subroutines and structures to learn. Of course, C is very low-level and you’re expected to face manual memory management (and memory leaks), bit by bit serialization, pointer to functions (no closures here), architecture and operating system differences and maybe things like varargs, setjmp and mmap. You should be able to understand the implications on performance some decision has. This insight is something C has been a great language at and will hardly be acquired learning another language.

Haskell

Haskell is one of the languages I learnt this year. It’s a typed purely functional language. It’s a great language. It has great concepts to decrease the total number of lines of code you should write (like list comprehensions and pattern matching), a clever syntax and some great concepts you could learn (higher-order functions, currying, lazy evaluation…).

Not all about Haskell was new to me, as I had already learn functional programming through Scheme some years ago, but Haskell does a much better job. I hate Lisp naming conventions (car for the head of the list, seriously) and excessive number of parentheses. You shouldn’t have to follow my path. You should be introduced to functional programming with Haskell.

Object-oriented programming is one of these must-have skills for a programmer and I think Ruby, being purely object-oriented, is a great language to learn this paradigm. Hide and encapsulate!

I choose to learn Ruby looking for a scripting language to empower a possible game engine that I might code. Ruby really impressed me. Ruby is so dynamic that even if I design a wrong class hierarchy or something, Ruby probably has a way to fix it. I don’t intend to design bad hierarchies, but I don’t know who will use my possible future game engine and this concern then becomes undeniably important.

JavaScript

One of the worst languages I’ve ever seen. But also one of the best languages I’ve ever seen (yep, out there you can find programming languages that would surprise you in the bad way). This language is not what I’d like to be the most popular, but it’s just enough to not be hated. Also, it runs on about every web browser, which is like… everywhere. Importance and interoperability. It’s like you really need to know JavaScript.

Not knowing anything about JavaScript is almost like not knowing how to read in the programming industry. It’s a terrible language full of bad decisions, but it’s the common denominator of the web development.

Learning JavaScript also may help to solidify concepts you should know like asynchronous APIs, JSON and some others.

XML/HTML

Responsible for most of the web traffic, this is a pretty important and simple language to understand how web documents are structured. If you think I’m overestimating web, it’s because it’s one of the greatest things we have. But XML is not only about web, it’s about interoperable documents and protocols and it is used as such. You can find XML in use within vector formats, formats for office applications and even chat protocols. I think learning the basics of XML is a big deal.

LaTeX

I personally think that the LaTeX tools aren’t among the most polished tools. Just look at the Makefile generated by Doxygen to see the run-until-no-more-differences-found loop to work around inconveniences in the LaTeX tools. Or just look at the terrible error messages. Also, the syntax isn’t surprisingly pleasant.

But when you want to focus on the content, forget about the accumulated little formatting details and produce beautiful scientific papers, a book with consistently in-between linked references or even just a few math formulas, LaTeX is probably what you should, at least, consider.

Bonus: bash

Capable to automate the most surprising tasks in a computer, if you are using an Unix variant system. You could automate builds, customize software startup sequences and manage your system. But if you’re using an Unix variant system, you already may be aware of that.

Notes

No Java, C++ or Python in this list. Maybe I’ll do a part 2 of this article containing languages with a lesser chance to be used like SQL, MongoDB, OpenGL, R, GStreamer or some Assembly. Actually, I think Java, C++ and Python have a better chance to be used than Haskell, but if you learn every language in this list, C++, Java and Python will be easy to catch up and the lines of code you write will be more elegant.

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Till today, I didn’t read a post defending PHP. There are all these texts attacking the language. And I dislike most of these texts I’ve read. I don’t like the attacked PHP language either. But what I dislike above all is the excessive use of fallacies. How could we have a logical discussion if we keep using them?

I don’t mind if you share a personal experience that cannot be used to prove a statement. If we’re lucky, your experience might be fun to read or will teach us to avoid specific behaviour in specific circumstances that may apply in specific ages.

I don’t mind if you carefully expose facts that the creators want to hide from us to affect our level of trust to such creators, as long as you use evidences to sustain such facts. You aren’t trying to logically prove something, but you text is also useful.

I don’t even mind if you create a text completely relying on fallacies, but I mind a lot if someone use such text to justify a decision. These texts, to my experience, tend to be fun anyway.

So, there are the two following linked texts about PHP, and in one of two, the author demonstrate more PHP knowledge than the other. Which one deserves more of your trust/attention?